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As ICANN Gains Full Oversight Of Domain Name System, Some Wonder If It Means the US Has Given Away The Internet (bbc.com)
The U.S. has given up its remaining control over the Internet. The formal handover, which took effect on Saturday, followed a last-ditch attempt by a group of Republicans to block the move. They had argued that the US concession would open the door for authoritarian governments get control of the network of networks, leading to greater censorship. From a BBC report:A judge in Texas has put the kibosh on a last-minute legal attempt to block the controversial decision for the US to give up control of one of the key systems that powers the internet. It's a move being breathlessly described by some as the US "giving up the internet" to the likes of China, Russia and the Middle East. For starters, while they can take the credit for inventing the underlying technology, the US never "had the internet" to begin with. Nobody did. It's a, duh, network. Decentralised. That's what makes it so powerful. But there are bits of internet infrastructure that some people and governments do have control over, and that's what this row is all about. One of them is the DNS - Domain Name System. This is the system for looking after web addresses. Thanks to the DNS, when you type bbc.com, you're taken to the correct servers for the BBC website. It saves you the grief of having to remember a string of numbers. That pairing of names and numbers is kept in one great big master file, the land registry of the web. The only organisation that can make changes is Icann, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. As of Saturday 1 October 2016, Icann will no longer be under US government oversight.
It's the smell of Freedom!
If only they'd built a wall around it before September hit.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Pardon me for trying to understand your stance on this but are you actually going to tell me that the US, who literally invented the internet under grants from DARPA, was suppressing freedom of speech and the exchange of ideas on the internet? IF so I am pretty sure I can't get my head up my ass far enough to ever see things from your perspective. The control of the internet has now been seeded to the likes of Russia and and China, two of the most active suppressors of free speech and the exchanging of ideas on the planet right now. We will not even begin to touch on the middle eastern dictatorships and their bent on internet "freedom" The real problems are soon to come with the active suppression of domains coming down from the top level DNS servers that are now under the control of foreign actors. This opens up the possibility of site redirection and suppression on a scale that has only been seen thus far in places like China, Russia, and the middle eastern dictatorships. The US is not a perfect steward by any stretch of the imagination to be sure but it was still far better than what is coming down the pipe at us now.
A relative of mine was freaked out about this because pundits made it sound like these countries would be in a position to dictate policy over how we run our slice of the Internet. When I explained how the Internet works and how the US has absolutely no obligation to ever follow their dictates, even going so far as to fork the DNS system if absolutely necessary to keep them from controlling our slice of the Internet the reaction was "then... what's the big deal?"
It seems a lot of people angry about this don't understand that the federal government has precisely no legal obligation to give a flying fuck what other governments think about our domestic internet policies. So if we want to let the NSA steal all of North Korea's secrets and drop leaflets in North Korea showing installation instructions for TOR and how to get to the NSA's cloud hosted wikileaks clone for the juiciest data the DPKR doesn't want its people to know, the rest of the world can't do anything to stop us--just like they can't right now.
You should read what Reporters Without Borders have to say on the matter: http://12mars.rsf.org/2014-en/ .
How much influence? About as much as they currently do.
The nations of the world are already on the advisory board of ICANN, including China, Russia and the various Middle East nations. The US doesn't lose influence, and no other nation gains it. The only change is what court ICANN answers to. You know those people who use the courts to seize domain names and transfer ownership by force? Those are the only ones who stand to lose anything... and their astroturfing is the big reason everyone's so terrified about the USA 'giving up the internet'.
The problem there is that they are mixing up surveillance issues with speech issues; the one is distinct from the other in some very important ways.
Surveillance is out of control pretty much everywhere, if for no other reason than the bad actors are running completely loose worldwide. Government and corporate. Speech, however, can exist in a country that allows it, regardless if a government is looking at it, or not.
Reporters tend to do their own gnarly things with speech anyway; they have a soapbox, and it is almost impossible not to serve some viewpoint when on it. I do wish the news was, you know, news, and not opinion, but even picking what stories to cover (and so, by extension, what stories not to cover), some issues get attention, and others don't. That happens at the editorial, reporting, and news consumer reading level, often with leverage from advertisers applied quite strongly.
In the context of that kind of mess, I still wave a flag for being as free as possible to say what you want.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I think, countries with the most prison inmates hate freedom.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
You're right. In this context, the US first amendment is a lot weaker than what most western countries have. The entire US "bill of rights" has that awkward phrase "Congress shall make no law...." Congress doesn't have to make a law to get a private company to yank your entry in the DNS database, and restrictions on the actions of the US congress don't mean anything for any non-US government, and only apply to other US governments, mostly, via a supreme court decision.
The UN itself has this:
which is pretty apropos.
The US supreme court has maybe been a bit more zealous in many cases about shooting down interpretations of the exceptions than in other places (they have upheld exceptions, of course). But that can change with new justices, it's not at the level of actual constitutional law.